


Leverage in Space

by BurningTea



Category: Leverage
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 08:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16343045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: The four best thieves in the world all end up on the same colony ship. What could possibly go wrong?Apart from an alien robot attack, a little boy on the run and crash landing on a planet they've never heard of, that is.





	Leverage in Space

Parker’s safe in her vent. Vibrations run through the metal and into her body. They’re the only clue that she’s not in a building. The pitch and sway she’d expect from a train are absent, and it isn’t like the rolling swell of waves around a ship. She has plenty of experience with all of those, but this is the first time she’s been off planet.  
Not all that far away, the almost nothingness of space is waiting. There’s no up out there, no down, nothing so ordinary as falling.  
A clang and a voice snap her attention to the room below.  
‘Oh, Hell no,’ the voice says.  
It’s a warm voice, and it goes up and down like a song. Not a happy song, but it’s not the boring drone so many voices are. Parker edges forwards to look down and see who the voice belongs to. A man stands in front of the room’s datascreen, shaking his head. The buttercup yellow of a colonist’s jumpsuit is bright against his dark skin. Parker likes it. He’s looking down at a device in his hands, a device with a trailing wire that’s plugged into the datascreen. That, she likes less.  
Whatever he’s doing, Parker’s plans say nobody should be in this room, and nobody should be plugging anything into the system from here. It’s unexpected, and that means it’s a risk.  
Folding her hands together, she rests her chin on them and narrows her eyes. She has five ways out of the vents, but this is her first choice. Maybe he’ll leave before her plan says it’s time for her to get moving, and maybe he won’t.  
‘We talked about this,’ the man says. ‘You and me? We had ourselves an understanding. Don’t you go being like this now.’  
He’s talking to someone, someone Parker can’t see. More risk. Only…no. No, he’s talking to the device, giving it a tap as though he’s telling off a naughty puppy. The device bleeps. Parker’s never seen someone have a conversation with a device like that, not where the thing talks back. She knew all those people who said computers and things weren’t really alive were wrong.  
The man’s grinning, telling the device he knew it wouldn’t let him down, and Parker decides he doesn’t seem like much of a risk so far. Besides, he’s more interesting to watch than an empty room, and she needs to stay hiding until they’re past launch. He can be her friend, even though he’ll never know she’s there.

***

Eliot twists the wrench and keeps his body relaxed. He’s just an ordinary mechanic, working away on this panel of lights and beeps and fuck knows what else. The guy with the neck tattoo is moving calmly, but he’s not good enough at playing harmless to fool Eliot. He’s searching. Hunting. Even if he hadn’t recognized that God-awful scrawl of ink, Eliot would have known this was a hitman.  
Five years ago, in what was left of a town now called Zero. A high chance Ink-scrawl will recognize Eliot, what with the way a railway spike wielded that way tended to leave an impression.  
Still, there’s that tiny margin of possibility that Eliot can avoid a fight. This corridor is light in activity, but he needs to fly so far under the radar he’s skimming the ground on this one. Vance didn’t give him many details. He gave even less support.  
As the guy - Nick, that was it - draws close, the body language tells Eliot that margin has gone.  
He grips the wrench. Thing is useless, anyway. Hell if Eliot knows how to use these computerized pieces of crap. He’s got to admit, though, the balance isn’t bad, the heft of it in his hand is good enough for the job, and he spins, striking out at Nick in defense of a blow he doesn’t intend to stand around and wait for. Nick stumbles back, his arm just catching the wrench, and pulls a knife.  
‘A knife?’ Eliot asks. ‘Who the fuck you got backing you to get a knife on here?’  
Nick is nowhere near Eliot’s level, but he’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut and his focus on the fight. Eliot could end this in a death, simple as, but that is… It’s not the optimum outcome. So, looks like he’ll be avoiding kill or be killed, and before anyone wanders by and spots this.  
He adjusts his stance and rolls his shoulders.  
‘We doing this?’ he asks, twirling the wrench. ‘Or you gonna stand around and stare at me all day? I know I’m pretty man, but I got shit to do.’  
Nick grunts, and his whole body screams his next attack, only something else screams louder. Someone. It’s high-pitched and dripping terror, and it has a bunch of friends in moments.  
The second of hesitation in Nick is enough for Eliot to close and put him down, out cold and set to wake with a headache, but alive. He needs to hide Nick someplace. He needs a way to hide an unconscious man who can I.D. Eliot as a killer for hire, on a colony ship which is already far enough through its launch sequence that the Earth is a ball behind them.   
He can think of seven ways to stage Nick’s dead body so the scent is thrown well clear of Eliot.  
The screaming hasn’t stopped. That’s real fear he’s hearing, the kind he never wanted to hear again, and he really doesn’t need the memories it drags up.  
‘Fuck,’ he mutters.  
He sets off at a run in the direction of the terror. He leaves Nick breathing into the floor. He takes the wrench and Nick’s knife with him.

***

Hardison watches the symbols flicker on the datascreen. He’s almost got the access he needs. Well, the access he needs to move onto the next phase of Operation: Danger. No way can Chaos claim the win on this one. The ranting is going to be sweet.  
The symbols freeze. And no. No, no, no, that is not what should be happening. He isn’t through the first layer yet, and he has to watch, fingers twitching uselessly, as the screen whites out and dies. There’s just a glimpse, an image there and gone so fast he might have imagined it, of symbols he’s never seen before, and the datascreen shuts down.  
He doesn’t even have time to swear before the lights go out, too.  
In the dark, out of the Earth’s atmosphere, Hardison tells himself not to panic. Just because there’s no oxygen out there and the thin skin of metal around him runs on the same systems that have quit working, that’s no reason to assume death is coming for him. He’s smart, he’s resourceful, and…he has nothing on him that will let him breathe in vacuum.  
Shit.  
A clanging above him makes him freeze. Sounds like metal on metal, only a short way above his head, but sounds can be weird in the dark. It might be nothing. Just something cooling or something, like in an old house at night. He’ll just stand here and if he hears the noise again he’ll try and work out where exactly it’s coming from, and-  
Fingers wrap around his wrist. He stops breathing.  
‘Was that you?’ a voice asks. It doesn’t sound anywhere near as worried as it should do, being alone in the dark with a stranger. In a room that was empty when the lights were on.  
‘Was what me?’ he asks, voice rasping.  
The fingers tighten.  
‘Making the lights go off. Did you do that? Put them back on. I don’t need them off yet.’  
Yet?  
‘I do not know who you are,’ he says, and this time his voice comes out stronger. Strangled, but stronger. ‘How do I know you didn’t plunge us into eternal darkness?’  
A snort is not the response he expected. The fingers loosen their hold and are gone. When she speaks again, the stranger in the dark, she’s further away from him and might not be at the same height. Were there space ghosts? Floating space ghosts that could touch people?  
‘Eternal darkness,’ she says. She sounds part amused, part enthralled. ‘Everyone would have to learn to see with their fingers.’  
Screaming is really not what Hardison needs to hear right then. His mind supplies him with a vivid image of anaconda sized fingers, wriggling by themselves through the corridors of the ship, each fingertip encrusted with eyes, and he has got to stop spending so much time gaming.  
‘What was that?’ he manages.  
A light springs on, across on the other side of the room and halfway up the wall. It lights up a woman’s face, a disembodied head floating in a pool of golden light. She’s grinning like this is fun.  
‘No idea,’ she says. ‘Space monsters?’  
‘You have a torch?’ he asks. ‘You had a torch this whole time and you did the whole…seeing fingers thing.” He catches himself wiggling his fingers in the air and stops. That space monsters comment was not helpful. ‘What are you standing on? You ain’t that tall.’  
No way can she be that tall. Her head’s higher than Hardison’s!  
The light shifts, and with her body illuminated, he can see she’s sitting cross-legged on a shelf he hadn’t even noticed when the light was on. There is nothing around it she can have used as a step up.  
Still, screaming. Screaming is more important. Or finding out what’s causing the screaming, anyway. Screaming that he can’t help but notice is getting closer.  
A moment later, the lights snap back on. The woman shifts and lands in front of Hardison, the torch nowhere to be seen.  
‘It’s on the corridor outside,’ she says, a flat statement, as though she can see through walls.  
‘We’re all tucked away in here,’ Hardison says.  
The next shout is real close. It can only be a few feet from their door. Hardison feels his heart rate pick up. Those are people, scared out of their minds, running. And whatever that thing is out there, however dangerous it might be, if he stands here and just lets people be shut out…  
He sends a prayer to his Nana. She ain’t dead, but Hardison is damn sure a little thing like that won’t stop her having the power and wrath of an angel if anything hurts her Alec.  
‘What are you doing?’ the woman asks, as he takes a step towards the door. ‘Are we going to look at the space monsters?’  
‘We’re not leaving people out there,’ he says, reaching the door and hitting the code to open it.  
Nothing. He hits it again. Still nothing. Something hits the door from the other side and Hardison flinches, but he doesn’t let that stop him from prising off the control panel. He can fix this. He can get this door open so the space monsters can come in and rip his head off, and he did not need that thought.  
‘Get out of the way,’ the woman says.  
‘Not leaving them out there!’  
He stumbles as she shoves him, winding up a few steps from the door, the control panel trailing wires in his right hand. She glares at him from her new position, some kind of twisted metal in her hand.  
‘I’m a key,’ she says, like that makes sense, and does something he doesn’t follow to the mechanical lock.  
She offers him a fleeting smile as the door slides open, but there isn’t time to get into it. At once, two people fall through the door, scrambling up from the floor and out of the way of another person. The last one has blood seeping from a cut on his head.  
‘Close it!’ he shouts, spinning and smacking the wall by the door. He tries again, managing to hit the wall a bit closer to the hole left by the control panel this time, but it’s clear from the way he’s swaying that he’s not all that likely to hit bullseye.  
Wouldn’t do any good if he did.  
Hardison moves in and check the wires inside the hole, but there’s hours of repairs right there. The woman meets his eyes, a set look on her face. She nods.  
Together, they grab the edge of the door and try to force it closed, but it doesn’t shift. It doesn’t shift, and now it isn’t screaming Hardison hears. It’s the grating rip of metal giving under extreme stress.  
This time, it’s the man with the headwound who shoves at Hardison, near enough bouncing off but trying again right away.  
‘It’s coming!’  
Hardison gives up on the door and takes hold of the guy’s shoulders, pushing him back into the room. If he can get everyone into the corner, maybe whatever it is out there won’t see them. Better than standing in the doorway waiting for it. He has to grapple with the man and that is not what Hardison does, but damned if he’s going to just let someone die, let them all die, if he can do something about it.  
‘The corner,’ he says. ‘Get in that corner.’  
The others follow the direction of his nod, the woman with the torch seeming to materialize there, but headwound near enough wails and makes another attempt to get by. He drags Hardison around and back closer to the door. In the struggle, Hardison manages to detach the guy and send him back into the room, but cold dread coats his bones as he realises he’s ended up out of the room.  
A thud, a grunt of pain, and a sound of metal being punctured. It’s far too close. On this stretch of the corridor. With Hardison.  
Time slows, expands, as he turns to see the source of the terror. It’s a robot. An actual, made of metal and menace robot. Twice his height, with more limbs than should be possible on a thing roughly human shaped, the…the robot has one limb thrust through the wall. Inches below, a man stands with his back to that wall, his legs braced in some kind of stance and one arm out, creating what has to be a far too fragile shield for a young boy. Hardison can’t see the guy’s face, not with all that hair in the way, but he sees the blood. He sees the robot bring another limb up back and high, ready to pin or to strike.  
‘Hey!’ he shouts. ‘Hey! Frankenstein’s lawnmower! Leave them be!’  
The minute pause in the robot’s actions is apparently all the long-haired guy needs. He slips out from under the braced limb, hooking the boy up off the floor and charging at Hardison. Who is suddenly, horribly aware he just called out a murderous metal beast. Which is now turning to follow.  
‘Take him,’ long-hair growls, and it is a growl.  
Hardison finds himself clutching the boy, who can’t be much more than ten, if that, his mind racing. Hiding in a corner is no plan. Maybe, if he hadn’t seen the robot, if he hadn’t let it see him, he could have hoped they’d be missed. He has no chance of fooling himself now.  
‘Hi. We running?’ the blonde woman asks, right beside him even though he swears she was out of sight a second ago. At Hardison’s look, she shrugs. ‘I’m running. They won’t come, but that’s not a good hiding spot.’  
The sharp nod back at the room manages to show disdain, as though she can’t quite believe some people are so emotional they can’t think logically about hiding places while a giant killer robot is on the loose. A robot that’s pulled itself free of the wall and is turning to face them, robot eyes a truly disturbing red.  
The guy with the hair glares at Hardison.  
‘Go!’  
Hardison doesn’t see what happens after that. He’s too busy running, the boy in his arms and the woman just ahead of him. He tells himself he doesn’t hear anything, either, because no way anything made of flesh can survive facing down that robot.

***

The alarm starts blaring a couple of corridors later, and much good may it do anyone. None of the training courses were on facing a robot. Leastways, Hardison was pretty sure they weren’t. Not like he’d exactly gone through the acceptance programme and training to be here.  
People respond to the alert, thronging the corridors in varying degrees of organisation. More than one person is running. Some are bleeding. Hardison keeps half an eye out for the guy they left fighting the robot, but the only man he sees with long hair is too tall and too blond.  
The woman ducks into an alcove, or rather a doorway with a decidedly shut door, and there is still no panic on her face. Calculation, yes. Annoyance, yes. Not panic.  
‘I’ve got two storage rooms and a vent we can reach from here,’ she says, and scrunches up one side of her face. ‘Well, one storage room. One freezer.’  
Hardison stares at her, holding the boy close even though he lets the kid slide so his feet are on the ground. The boy makes no move to pull away.  
‘I vote option 4,’ Hardison says. As her eyes narrow, he pats at his chest with his free hand. ‘Colonist yellow, baby. I got a ship.’  
It’ll mean fighting across a swarm of panicked people, going up one level, and learning real quick how to launch a family ship, but that alarm is the signal to abandon the colony ship, and for once Hardison feels like following an order.  
At her nod, he feels something in him unclench. He’s still scared. Terrified. But it’s not as bad, knowing she’s choosing to stick with him.  
‘We gonna be family, I should know your names,’ Hardison says. ‘I’m Hardison.’  
The boy just shakes his head and burrows closer to Hardison, but the woman smiles in a way that would be very scary from someone who wasn’t a family member.  
‘Parker,’ she says. ‘Let’s go get our ship.’  
And Hardison has to admit, he does like the sound of that pronoun.  
***

Despite the screams and the sounds of destruction from just around the corner, Sophie kneels by Dr Smith’s side with his hand clasped firmly between hers. She doesn’t know what happened, except he was terrified. She doesn’t know if an actual medical doctor could have done anything to save him. She does know leaving a man to die on his own was beyond her.  
But he’s dead now, and the sounds of running feet are fading, and the remaining human sounds are those of someone being hurt. And they’re close.  
Setting the dead man’s hand down, Sophie rises and takes the two steps to the juncture between this corridor and the next. She leans enough to see round the corner and feels her lips part in shock. Some monstrosity from a nightmare, a demon built of metal and lights, is attacking a man with long hair. As she watches, frozen for the moment by shock and by the need to adjust all of her plans, she sees the robot lash out with one of its limbs. It strikes the man across the chest, hurling him back, and he hits the wall with a sound that must mean something broken.  
Sophie pulls back out of sight, closes her eyes for three heartbeats, and lets herself land on a new role. No grift is going to give Sophie an edge right here. There is no persona she can adopt to go out there and save that man, if he’s even still alive. She only had that quick look, but a quick look is all she needs to make up her mind.  
‘I’m sorry,’ she says under her breath. She couldn’t say who to.  
By the time she heads up the corridor, away from the robot and towards the family ships, she’s Dr Smith, complete with I.D. badge and jacket.

***

Nate closes his eyes briefly. To Nigel and Anne Peterson, it might look like he’s praying, but Nate hasn’t felt the sense of God’s presence in two years. He left his faith behind in that hospital room, and the only spirit he calls on now is contained in the glass in his hand.  
‘You must have some idea what’s going on,’ Nigel says. Demands.  
There’s fear in his voice, but it’s buried under layers of entitlement. Nate could say something reassuring. He could use this to manoeuvre the couple, to increase their trust in him. But his head throbs from too little whisky and too much grief. Besides, dying in space might erase the need to prove this couple have made false insurance claims. Nigel is just the sort of person who thinks nothing of another’s fear, and, faithless or not, Nate spent long enough preparing for the Church that he thinks this chance to understand, perhaps to repent, might be good for Nigel Peterson’s soul.  
‘Well?’ Nigel asks. ‘Mr Ford?’  
‘Alarms,’ says Nate, opening his eyes and staring into his glass. ‘Screams.’ A low, rumbling sound and the deck shaking beneath his feet make Nate’s lips quirk up. ‘Explosions. Yeah, er, pretty sure we’re crashing and burning.’  
He drains his drink.  
‘Crashing?’ Anne asks. Her tone is more irritated and disbelieving than it is anything else. ‘We can’t be crashing. We’re in a spaceship! In space! There’s nothing to crash into.’  
Honestly, she sounds a few minutes from insisting on seeing the manager. Nate shrugs and makes his way across the swaying deck to the nearest viewport. He knows he should feel something other than resignation right now, and he thinks he does. It’s just distant, unimportant. As is the fact a planet lies below them, a planet that should not be there. Still, that won’t be his mystery to solve if whatever is attacking reaches this family ship, and that’s if the whole vessel doesn’t perish around him.  
Anne joins him, perhaps intending to continue her refusal at reality, but her gasp tells Nate she notices the planet.  
‘The planet!’ she shouts, even though Nigel is only on the other side of the room. ‘We need to launch. Now!’  
As the ship lurches and detaches itself from the larger colony ship, Nate pours himself another drink and watches the scene outside. Other ships are trying to leave the disaster around them, and Nate raises his glass as first one, then another, ignites and dies without reaching the planet.  
He thinks the new feeling creeping up in him is relief, that he might soon join them. That he might soon join Sam.

***

Eliot lies under crumpled metal and takes stock. His right knee is blown, a rib is busted, and there’s no sense counting up the cuts. The real problem, though, is his head. One eye isn’t focusing and he’s groggy. No way can he shift the wall panels he’s buried under, and it’s sheer chance they didn’t crush him dead. No sound of the robot, but that’s no guarantee it’s really gone.  
Won’t matter soon. Eliot saw the damage that last flurry of strikes did to the power junction. This whole section of the ship’ll blow long before Eliot’s fit to move.  
In the near dark, he finds himself grinning, a biting laugh filling his throat. The deadly Eliot Spencer, wanted in multiple countries and feared in even more, is going to die here, alone, trapped in metal, all because he fought a walking toaster in space.  
He supposes even robots can do God’s work.  
It’s getting real quiet, real peaceful, and Eliot doesn’t feel much pain. Hard to feel much of anything now except grim acceptance, but he does spare a thought for the kid. No kid should ever look as scared and as lost as that one had. Eliot’s only option was to trust the boy to a man who looked almost as freaked out as the kid had, and to a woman who didn’t look to be having much of any reaction at all.  
‘Sorry, kid,’ he tells the dark. ‘Best I could do.’  
He doesn’t say sorry to the shades pressing around him. It won’t do any good anyway. They’ve waited long enough to claim him, and he’s never fooled himself on that score. Few more minutes, and they can take him.  
It’s almost an irritation when he hears the faint sounds of metal shifting. Not that it changes much. He ain’t fighting anymore, and the dark will have him before that robot can reach him. It can do what it likes with his corpse. 

***

The ice-wind is cold against Parker’s cheeks and she sucks it in to her lungs. So much fresher than the near-dead air in space. Well, in the spaceship. Below her, the ice-field stretches in cliffs and chasms all the way to the horizon, but horizons are just lines humans draw in their understanding. From space, this didn’t look like an ice-planet. It’s just a case of how far away the non-iced parts are.  
She hears the clunk of the hatch behind her and twists to watch Hardison grumble his way out into the light. He squints in her direction. The hat he’s wearing has ear-flaps and a lot of different colours.  
‘Where we at?’ he asks. He leaves the hatch open and joins Parker, turning his squint to the landscape below them. ‘Well, damn. This is some North of the Wall shit, right here.’  
He sounds part worried, part impressed, but Parker knows she often gets people’s emotions wrong. She’s also learned that Hardison makes a lot of references to things she hasn’t heard of, so she doesn’t bother asking which wall he means.  
‘Ships got no fuel,’ she tells him, and shrugs. ‘Not enough, anyway.’  
‘Enough for what?’ he asks.  
‘To get off the planet,’ she says.  
Hardison is quiet for a while, or as quiet as he seems to be able to manage, before he speaks again. This time, she’s almost sure he’s sounding worried.  
‘Ship was meant to be all fuelled up already, and landing here shoulda taken, what, fifteen percent, max? Should be able to bounce back into space easy.’  
Parker shrugs. She knows what the fuel readings show.  
‘I can go see how far the ice stretches,’ she says. At a disbelieving noise from Hardison, she goes on. ‘We’ll need to walk out.’  
‘So you gonna walk out to see how long it’ll be to walk out? Nah-ha. No way. I am not a yeti. It’s against my religion.’  
Parker doesn’t ask what religion that is, but she does file it away. People can be really odd about gods and things and she doesn’t know how long she’ll be stuck with this Hardison. She thinks she should probably be more annoyed about that.   
‘What do you think we should do?’ she asks. Challenges, really, but it’s not like she owes this guy any respect. He isn’t Archie. ‘We can’t survive on the ice forever.’  
She’s ready to tell him how long the average human can survive in arctic conditions and how her own chances stack up, but he shakes his head and steps backwards, starting to talk as he turns and sets off to the hatch.  
‘There’s a perfectly good transit in the hold,’ Hardison says. ‘Pieces of it, anyhow. Just got to lego it together and we got wheels.’  
Parker follows him back down into the ship and along the corridor as he continues a dialogue with himself. He talks a lot. She wonders how he’s ever managed to avoid stealing anything without being heard. Maybe he just talks at the people who catch him and they let him go so they can be quiet again. In any case, he talks them to the engine room and glares at the read-outs with a frown.  
‘Oh, that ain’t right,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘That ain’t right at all.’  
Parker glances at the read-outs. They say exactly what she already told him they did.  
‘They say the same as the ones in the hub,’ she points out.  
‘Then they’re broken.’  
Parker steps closer, tilts her head, and sings a note. Given the volume of a fuel tank in a ship this size and configuration, the note she hears back is consistent with the readings. Hardison opens and shuts his mouth when she tells him so, and looks like his head is doing some sort of dance to music she can’t hear.  
‘Something must have taken it,’ she says, because that’s usually what’s happened when something isn’t where it was meant to be. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she adds.  
Before Hardison can tell her whatever it is he was about to tell her, something on his datapad starts to beep. Without speaking, he taps the screen and turns it to Parker, who sees camfootage of the boy. He’s outside the craft, tramping across the snow, a backpack almost as large as he is on his back.  
‘Now should I go walk about on the ice?’ Parker asks.  
Hardison nods.

***

‘Hey! Hey, wait up!’  
Parker calls out as soon as she’s close enough the boy should be able to hear, but he doesn’t stop. It’s not until she’s right next to him that he so much as glances at her, and there’s no tell to show when he first notices her. He does stop walking when she gets in front of him.  
‘Where are you going?’ she asks. ‘Your dad said you were to stay with us.’  
The boy pulls a face.  
‘My dad? He’s not my dad.’  
Parker takes him at his word. In her experience, dad’s aren’t the kind of people who’d fight a robot to save you.  
‘Well, whoever he was, you should come back with me. To the ship.’  
‘Why?’ the boy asks.  
‘So…so we can leave,’ Parker says, and really she should just keep going. She has some essentials stowed away on her person and her chances of surviving are higher off the ice than on it. Going back to the ship really isn’t logical. ‘We have to get Hardison and all go together.’  
‘I don’t want him to find me,’ the boy says and takes a step to the side, looking like he intends to walk right round Parker and away.  
She steps to the side to block him. Whatever reason the kid has for not wanting that man in the corridor to find him, walking off on his own isn’t the best plan. Parker is sneaky. She can help. It’s a newish thought, but she had to walk off on her own too many times as a kid.  
‘He won’t,’ she says. It’s a pretty safe statement to make. The guy was probably dead in a minute or two of them leaving that corridor. ‘Come back.’  
He stares at her, blinks, looks away, looks back, and Parker can’t tell if he’s going to agree. He has that wavering look about him that people sometimes get, the one where they sometimes run and they sometimes fight and they sometimes go really still like they want the whole world to stop seeing them. Parker’s good at all of them, but especially the first and the last ones. She doesn’t waver, though. It makes the inside of her skin itch to have to stand and wait while this boy works out what he’ll do.  
She can’t risk making him more likely to run. They promised to keep the boy safe. It’s a long time since she’s made a promise, and she doesn’t want to break this one.  
Finally, the boy nods.  
‘Okay. Okay, I’ll come back. But I can’t let him find me.’  
Parker holds out her little finger and waits as the boy frowns and slowly offers his own in return.  
‘We’ll keep you safe,’ she says. ‘Pinkie swear. You can’t break a pinkie swear.’  
That was something she’d always held to with her brother. It seems to work here. The boy takes a breath, his little finger still together with hers, and his shoulders drop a fraction.  
‘Okay,’ he says, and meets Parker’s eyes. ‘Parker, right?’  
‘Yeah.’  
‘And the man…he’s Hardison?’  
There’s another pause. The boy moves his hand so they’re more shaking hands than swearing a promise. His face is serious.  
‘Pleased to meet you, Parker,’ he says. ‘I’m Sam.’

*** 

Sophie waits until the creaking stops. With a final, grinding sound, it finally falls quiet. More or less quiet. Behind Sophie, the crewman who pushed his way onto her ship at the last minute is ranting, presumably to himself.  
‘I think that’s it,’ she says.  
The man stops muttering for long enough that Sophie locates and debates pressing the button to open the protective screen. It slammed shut after the first strike from debris and Sophie saw no point in fighting the ship on that one. Dr Smith…she had a ship in need of a serious service.  
‘Where’ve we landed?’ the man asks, his drawl adding warmth to his voice.  
Even under these conditions, Sophie is allowed to something beautiful when she finds it.  
‘Let’s find out, shall we?’ she replies, and pushes the button.  
The back of her seat gives a little. His hand, she surmises. Sure enough, his voice is much closer when he speaks again.  
‘Well, would you look at that.’  
Sophie agrees. It’s quite the view. A plateau stretches out below them, studded with forests and lakes and what looks to be a sea in the far distance. Or a great lake. It’s breath-taking, and she says so.  
‘Yeah, well,’ her hitchhiker says, ‘we wanna keep breath in our bodies, we best be finding a way out of this ship. Without rocking it.’  
Sophie frowns, but it only takes a second longer for her brain to register where she’s seeing this from. That is, there is no sign of any ground between her and the view. A view that is very, very far below her.  
‘You think we’re right on the edge of some cliff?’ she asks.  
‘I’m thinking we’re part over the edge of some cliff.’ He leans in, his hair brushing against her as he ducks right down to put his cheek near hers and points out. ‘The angle we’re at, this ship’s got to be more or less at its balance point. And that drop ain’t gonna be forgiving. We need to get out.’  
Taking his advice to heart, Sophie unstraps herself and slides from her chair as smoothly as she can. She’s run cons as a dancer more than once, and picked up enough control of her body to pass. She uses that control now as she turns and makes her way towards the back of the control room. And stops.  
‘Who is that?’ she asks.  
Another person lies on the floor, strapped to some kind of board and not moving. Blood seeps through his jumpsuit in more than one place, his long, dark hair is matter with it, and his eyes are part open, unseeing.  
‘Is he dead?’ she asks, as her hitchhiker stoops and takes hold of the still guy’s chin, apparently checking on something. ‘Did you bring a dead man on my ship?’ She holds a hand up to her throat. ‘Did you kill him?’  
‘What?’ the hitchhiker says, glancing up at her with a look that sums up irritated and dismissive in one go. ‘No. I found him under most of a wall and some ceiling. Pretty sure the idiot took on the rampaging robot.’  
Sophie readjusts her assumptions.  
‘He fought… Wait. I saw him. He lived through that?’  
And she was sure he would die. She left him. Not that she’s getting in to that right now.  
‘Not…exactly.’  
A shift under her feet sends her off balance, and she catches herself as her stomach and heart try to change places. The ship isn’t stable. They have to get out of here.  
‘We need to go,’ she says, and is relieved the blond-haired guy nods in agreement. ‘Can you move him?’  
‘Sure ain’t leaving him. This guy owes me money,’ he says.  
It isn’t easy getting out, moving and pausing and moving again as the ship keeps teasing them it might go over. Sophie casts a regretful look at more than one item spied through open doorways, but she isn’t about to risk her life for what might turn out to be worthless. She does insist on going a few steps into one store cupboard to pick up a pack.  
‘Emergency rations,’ she says, and her companion just nods.  
Once they’re out, she waits until they’re far enough back to set down the board and stretches her back. Around them, bits of metal and other debris show what happened to at least part of the ship. There are boxes and bags here and there, and Sophie intends to see what’s in at least some of them. If nothing else, she can’t afford anything that shows she really isn’t Dr Smith, even though she’s fairly sure she can talk her way out of charges on that score if needed.  
‘It’s hotter’n the Devil out here,’ her companion says, and there is no real reason for him to be grinning when Sophie looks back at him.  
‘Is the Devil especially hot?’ she asks, in the Boston accent she’s adopted for Dr Smith.  
‘Depends who you ask,’ he says. ‘Look, I don’t mean to be impolite, but we ain’t got time to stand around talking about the weather.’  
As though she mentioned it first! Really. She makes sure her body language is inviting enough to keep him feeling they’re on the same side whilst maintaining an element of distance, and sticks out a hand.  
‘Dr Smith,’ she says. ‘And the name of the man who hitched a ride on my ship?’  
Claiming ownership always put the other person on the back foot.  
He just grins some more, and takes her hand. His palm is warm and his fingers callused. She’s felt calluses like those before. Guns.  
‘Call me Hucklberry.’  
And she really isn’t in much of a position to call him out on lying.

*** 

‘We aren’t going to make it!’ Sophie shouts.  
Whether the man claiming to be Huckleberry hears her or not, he keeps slogging on. Rain sleets sideways, the kind of cold, driving rain that cuts right through clothing that’s anything less than completely waterproof. The hood of her suit is, in theory, capable of withstanding worse than some rain, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it as her hair plasters itself to her neck and her ears freeze. They’ve been trudging on for hours and the rain, light and easy enough to ignore at first, has only continued to get worse. She can’t just stop, though. Stopping and watching Huckberry vanish into the weather will mean nothing but Sophie being alone and just as helpless. Even so, they have no chance of making it out of this valley before the storm hits properly. She can’t be the only one who knows what damage a storm can do.  
She sees Huckleberry stop and twist back to face her, the movement awkward as he keeps hold of the handles to the hurdle he’s fashioned for his near-dead friend.  
She makes herself speed up and finds him leaning in as soon as she’s next to him.  
‘Over there,’ he says, voice loud enough it’s only a shade away from shouting. ‘A cave. Bear left.’  
She does as he says. She hasn’t spotted anything, but he saw the danger in the ship before she did. He moves like the sort of person who knows danger. The fact he’s still alive suggests he might be the kind of person who’s also good at getting out of it.  
It takes them a long, squelching time to reach the rock Huckleberry saw, and there is a cave. Or rather, several tall, shallow depressions and a few smaller, deeper opening. They duck into the most likely looking one, but it only just gives them enough space to be out of the rain. The floor, at least, slopes back towards the entrance, so they aren’t sitting in a storm-wrought stream.  
Sophie watches her companion settle the hurdle in the most sheltered spot. She busies herself digging into the pack she liberated from the ship, a pack she identified correctly. Materials for a fire are a welcome sight.  
‘Won’t last long without more fuel,’ Huckleberry says, settling himself cross-legged across from Sophie but making no attempt to take over.  
As the first catches, his face is washed amber. He looks softer this way. Sadder. With the rain hammering a shield outside, it feels almost cosy in here. Intimate. Sophie has no practical way of knowing how long they’ll be stuck in this cave, or on this planet. She doesn’t know if they’re the only ones who made it. Connections are one of the most essential parts of survivial, she’s always found.  
‘You care for him,’ she says, pitching her tone at something close to the one she adopted a few years back, when she found herself playing a long-con as a therapist in LA. Calm, caring but slightly detached. Inviting. It was an easy role to slip back into. ‘Don’t worry. I’m a Doctor in psychology. Seeing someone you care about hurt like this… It can help if you talk about it.’  
Huckleberry grins again, but it’s a front. One he seems to be very good at, but a front nonetheless. He looks down at his hands as he speaks.  
‘Yeah, well, not like any of us have it easy right now, Doc. Besides, it takes more than a little death to keep my boy here down.’  
‘Your boy?’  
‘You really think telling you my life story is going to get us out of here?’ He asks it without anger, though. It’s almost…affectionate. Amused. ‘Me and… Me and him, we worked together. Saved each other’s life more than once. It doesn’t sit easy with me to think he might buy it here, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to focus on keeping him comfortable and on keeping all of us alive long enough to get someplace safe. You wanna take first shift?’  
A difficult mark. But not a hostile one, as such. Sophie gives him a smile and agrees to take first watch. She can’t imagine there’s anything to watch for in this downpour. For one thing, any creature would have to be capable of staying on its feet in wind that sounds to have picked up even more since they got in here. It does no harm to let Huckleberry rest.

*** 

Sophie isn’t going to abandon the men. She isn’t. It’s just Huckleberry isn’t going to leave the injured man, and none of them are going to make it through a serious storm in that tiny cave with no real provisions. And Sophie isn’t dying because a stranger is worrying over a lover he won’t admit to.  
The cave is already lost in the rainfall behind her and she has to make herself keep going on instead of turning back.   
In her hand, the light beeps, on and off, on and off. The tracker is basic, showing her only that someone is out in the direction she’s walking. She can only hope it’s someone who can help.

*** 

Eliot groans. Quinn leans in and very definitely doesn’t wrap himself around his ex-lover. They haven’t seen each other in a good while and Eliot doesn’t even know Quinn is here. Hell, Eliot might not know Eliot is here, at this point. And Quinn was only on that ship in the first place so he could get to Peggy. Even so, he aches to fold Eliot up, safe and sound, even if it won’t be the same with the guy not able to bitch about being the little spoon.  
‘Yeah, but you’re my little spoon,’ Quinn used to tell him. ‘My little angry murder spoon.’  
Now, he doesn’t know if Eliot has anyone in his life. News of Eliot just…stopped. Quinn had worried a little that Eliot was dead someplace, despite what Eliot was. He’d almost gone looking, more than once, but there was the niggling thought it might be Eliot wanting the world to think he was dead, and Quinn had promised not to go against Eliot’s wishes.  
‘You and me, we could have been something, El,’ he says now, giving in to the impulse far enough to run a finger along Eliot’s brow, pushing back his hair.  
Outside, the storm rages. It seems wrong, the climate being so angry when Eliot is so quiet, so still. This whole thing is wrong, the two of them being trapped here in this hollow in an alien planet. Quinn wraps his arms around Eliot’s chest again, deciding there’s no point in feeling guilt over cradling his ex. Not like Peggy even knowns he was on his way to her. Far as she’ll know, Quinn just chose to pass on her offer. It’ll hurt her, no doubt, but it won’t end her. She isn’t the kind to begrudge a dying man some comfort, anyway.  
‘Should have left you on the damn ship, El,’ he says to the top of Eliot’s head.  
They’re as warm as he can get them, considering, but it’s out of his hands now whether they make it through the night. Quinn shivers and tries to will more warmth into Eliot, who’s even colder.   
When he woke and found Dr Smith gone, he cursed himself. All his years of surviving and he goes and sleeps through a woman running off with half of their gear. No way is he going out in the storm after her and leaving Eliot, though. If they’re going to die, better to do it together than leaving Eliot here on his own.   
All he can do now is hope Dr Smith really does find help, and that she sends it for them.

*** 

Bug goes fast. Turned out, Hardison and her are a good team. A great team. They had the transit, a planetary buggy, put together and operational in no time. About two seconds after switching on the power, lights started flashing on the dashboard.   
‘Someone’s out there,’ Hardison said. ‘That’s a flare signal.’  
They didn’t even know the storm was coming when Parker set out. Hardison told her over the comms device he gave her before she got in Bug, a little thing that slid right in her ear and sat all hidden away.   
‘Turn back,’ he’d said.   
But he hadn’t wanted to leave people out there. He’d said as much when Parker asked him. Instead of turning back, she pushed Bug to go faster, and faster again, until she had it at its limits.   
The signal took her to a bedraggled woman who was barely in Bug before she begged Parker to go and pick up her friends. In her ear, Hardison gave information on the weather patterns he was now managing to scan, and Parker calculated the risk before the storm became too dangerous even for her.   
Now, the woman, Dr Smith, clutches on as Parker lets Bug run as fast as it can. The cave is right ahead.   
Parker stops Bug as close to the cave entrance as she can. When the door opens, it’ll be millimetres from the rock.  
‘What…? Where did…? Do not drive like that on the way back!’  
Parker looks back at Dr Smith to see the woman gripping handholds, one above her head and one to her side. She’s breathing more heavily than makes sense. After all, she’s only been sitting there.  
‘We got here,’ she says.  
They’re both having to raise their voices to be heard over the storm, even in the sealed space of the buggy. It’s more sheltered here than out on the plain, but this is the kind of storm that levels houses. The men Dr Smith insists were here are probably still here. Even Parker wouldn’t just set out in this. Not without a plan.  
Getting the door open involves muscle. The gale keeps trying to shut it again, confusing the buggy’s sensors.  
‘Stop it, Bug,’ Parker tells it. Hardison talks to his tech, and Hardison has already shown her he’s far better with the stuff than anyone else Parker’s ever met. ‘Stay here,’ she tells Dr Smith, before slithering out and landing on the ground.  
The white boots she found in storage are great for gripping, but they’re streaked with orange mud before she even takes a step. Never mind. She doesn’t have to camouflage here. She’s here to rescue two men she doesn’t know, because that’s what she does now. Rescues people. People she doesn’t know.  
She doesn’t have to call out. The cave is shallow enough she sees the fire at once, and spots the two men just after. One of them is very still. In the mix of firelight and shadows she can’t make out much more than he’s lying down. The other man crouches over him, looking ready to attack. Parker might not know what people are feeling very often, but she’s learned the hard way to watch out for that kind of body language.  
‘I can get you out of here,’ she says.  
‘Where to?’ the guy, Huckleberry, asks.  
‘Our ship’s an hour away.’  
‘He can’t walk,’ Huckleberry says. ‘And I ain’t taking him out in that.’ The sharp jerk of his chin makes his hair move. It’s kind of pretty, even if it is wet and messy.  
Parker frowns. She’s always found sneaking past people is easier than talking them round, but that isn’t an option here.  
‘We have medical supplies,’ she says. ‘Do you want him to die in this cave?’  
That seems to move things along.  
Back in Bug, Dr Smith and Huckleberry exchange nods and Dr Smith makes a comment about strapping the injured man in well. Parker ignores them, and drives.

*** 

‘He isn’t dead?’ Hardison watches from the doorway as Parker and Huckleberry lift the dead-looking guy onto a bed. ‘I thought for sure he’d be dead.’  
Dr Smith makes a noise that sounds like agreement, but Huckleberry flashes him a smile like they aren’t talking about a friend of his buying the kind of farm that does not lead to meeting a cute cowboy lover.  
‘Takes more than a little robot to put my man here out of action.’  
It’s hard to say how being out cold and barely breathing counts as still in action, but Hardison lets it pass. They have plenty of things to be worrying over and it’d be nice to accept that a man who’d protect a little kid from a murderous walking toaster might come out of it alive and well. Greater chance is they just got front row seats to a slow death.  
Parker had Sam look in at the man back in the transit and only let then bring him in once Sam shook his head. Hardison doesn’t know what that was about. At least the guy’s in the warmth and out of the rain now.   
‘Okay,’ Hardison says. ‘Well, we got some pain relief, fluids, some other medical type things, but far as I know, we ain’t got a doctor. Unless…?’  
He looks at Dr Smith, but she holds a hand out and shakes her head.  
‘Oh, no. Not my kind of medicine. Once he’s awake, I can give him a chance to talk through the trauma, but I’m afraid I can’t do anything for him until then. If anyone else needs to talk, though, just let me know.’  
Because the first thing anyone needs to do in the middle of being lost on an unknown planet with no fuel and a near-dead, robot-fighting man is to sit in a sharing circle.  
‘Right,’ Hardison says, trying not to draw the word out too much. ‘We’ll keep that in mind. Um. In the meantime, I got the network most of the way to up and running. It’s more limping, but it should give us an idea of if any other ships are on the same continent. Just got to let it work through a start-up and we’ll know if we’ve got friends out there.’  
Parker snorts. She’s leaning against the wall near the foot of the bed, her arms crossed, and she frowns when they all look at her.  
‘Friends?’ she asks, as though that’s so stupid it must be a joke.  
Thing is, nobody jumps in and starts listing people they hope might be around. Hardison knows why he hasn’t got anyone he’s burning to see and it’s pretty clear Parker was on the ship illegally, but the others are crew or colonist. Or say they are.  
Huckleberry breaks in before Hardison can come up with a way of asking further questions that won’t out him as a thief himself.  
‘Say, you guys got a place I can wash up? Clean clothes would be a real help, too. Don’t have to be designer.’  
Roguish looking men should not be up in Hardison’s ship with smiles as attractive as that, but fortunately Hardison is a professional and he can focus on the task at hand. The network will be ready to go any second. That’s more important. Maybe there’ll be some kind of medical personnel who can come and help the not-dead guy. A guy who still hasn’t been named.  
One thing at a time.  
‘Pick yourself a berth,’ Hardison says, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the personal living space. ‘Showers are where they normally are. Spare clothes are in storage. You too, Doc.’  
He leaves without bothering to check they follow his direction. Parker already claimed a spot as hers, and he’d be lying if he said having more people bedding down didn’t feed the warm, satisfied feeling he’s had since Parker agreed to come with him. The boy, Sam, has his space and now there’re three others in Hardison’s family. Ship. In Hardison’s… In the family ship Hardison has liberated.  
All he’s saying is, if he’s got to be stranded here, it’s nice to have a little company.

*** 

It takes them a little while and a fight with some creatures Hardison never wants to see again and that Parker seems to want to befriend, but they work out the local diet is heavy on the stuff they use for fuel, and their ship landing was taken as an all you can eat buffet.   
Hardison has Quinn and Parker help him jury-rig a workaround that lets them burn the last dregs of fuel, and they send their ship on a quick lift and drop to clear the ice.   
‘I guess now we’d better see if anyone else made it down,’ Hardison says, and sets the system to do a full sweep of as much of the planet as it can reach.

***

Nate listens as Nigel takes the call from another ship. For someone who had to make a crash-landing on an unknown planet, the Petersons don’t seem all that relieved to hear from another survivor. If anything, Nigel sounds impatient, and Anne’s lips are pressed together in a way that says someone will be getting a stiffly worded letter. Or a bullet. Nate is no stranger to the kinds of things the rich will do to people they see as inconvenient.  
Or what they won’t do.  
When Nigel says he doesn’t think there’s any need to risk covering the terrain between ships, Nate clears his throat. He keeps his expression calm, almost amiable, as he holds eye contact with Nigel and waits for the man to fold.  
‘What is it, Mr Ford? You don’t agree?’  
‘I can’t help thinking we’re safer in numbers,’ Nate says.  
‘We don’t know what’s out there,’ Anne says.  
‘Well, no. No, that we don’t.’ Nate turns away from them and makes a show of peering out of the nearest window. ‘We don’t have any real idea what’s out there. What might hunt us.’ He leaves a lingering silence as he paces along to the next window, catching sight of the Peterson’s expressions from the corner of his eye. They look torn between outrage at a mere insurance investigator speaking to them out of turn, and a little worried. ‘You know, predators, they have quite the range of…specifications. Hmm. Yeah. Packs, pairs, lone hunters. Tiring prey until they drop, landing on your back, gouging out your innards. So many. Who knows what we’ll find here, on an alien planet?’  
There’s an edge of frustration in Nigel’s voice as he cuts in. ‘All the more reason to stay in our ships.’  
‘Can you go? We can’t go,’ a woman says over the comms.  
‘What do you mean by ‘can’t go?’ Nate asks, before either of his unintentional shipmates can respond.  
The man who spoke before answers. ‘We’re down to our last drops of fuel. Not even enough to take a spin around the block.’  
‘Eels,’ the woman says. She sounds strangely cheerful about it.  
‘They were not eels,’ the man says. ‘Nah. Nah-as, they weren’t space eels. Eels don’t eat ship fuel. Park-’  
A scuffling sound replaces the voices and when it clears the woman is the only one on the line.  
‘Did space eels eat your fuel, too?’  
It’s almost worth being stranded to see the look on Anne’s face when she comes back from the engine room to confirm the ship is dry. Almost.  
‘So, we can’t leave, even if we do hear the attack is over and the colony ship is safe,’ Nate points out. ‘Unless we want to start a new colony here, with…how many ships have you located, Mr…?’  
‘Eight. And it’s Hardison,’ the man, Hardison, replies. He shouts it, because it seems the woman won’t give him the comms unit back, though quite where she’s managing to stand that it’s out of anyone’s reach but still connected to the network, Nate has no idea. ‘The others are all for joining up, finding a way to stay alive while we hunt down some kinda fuel replacement. Least, until we can get in touch with the colony ship and get them to send help.’  
Which very well might be never. Nobody had so far reported being able to make contact, which rather suggested a problem with the colony ship itself or with wider conditions.  
‘Where are we meeting?’ Nate asks.  
Before Hardison can tell him, Nigel leans in and talks over him.  
‘We appreciate the offer, Mr Handyson, but my wife and I will be just fine. Thank-you.’  
With that, he ends the call. When Nate raises an eyebrow at him, Nigel scowls.  
‘If you want to take your chances out there in the wilds of an alien landscape, Mr Ford, feel free. I am not having our chances dragged down by a random group of strangers. No. We’ll sort this ourselves.’  
And that was where Nate had to leave it.

*** 

It’s nearing dark when Hardison hears Huck talking to someone just outside the ship. At this point, any excuse to look away from the data that keeps saying they’re stuck here is welcome. He goes outside to find Huck talking to a man who looks in need of at least three drinks.  
‘Hey, this here is Mr Nathan Ford,’ Huck says, clapping Ford on the back and not seeming to notice the way the guy winces. ‘We got room in the boat for one more?’  
Before Hardison can reply, Ford’s gaze shifts from him to the doorway behind him.   
‘And this is our very own Dr Smith,’ Huck says, as the psychologist comes to a halt next to Hardison.   
‘Dr Smith?’ Ford says.  
The pause is long enough that Hardison turns to see why Dr Smith hasn’t answered. She’s motionless, staring at Ford. Then, she sighs, and her whole…everything changes. She’s still the same woman: same hair, same face, same clothes. At the same time, she really isn’t the same at all. From one breath to the next, she’s become someone else.  
‘Nathan Ford,’ she says. In an English accent.   
Hardison is going to need a moment.   
He doesn’t get one.   
‘Sophie.’ Ford doesn’t seem thrown at all. ‘I didn’t know the colonists had a lot of expensive art with them.’  
‘Well, you’d know,’ Sophie says, and she didn’t toss her hair that way when she was Dr Smith. ‘You know how much everything is worth down to the last copper.’  
Before Hardison is over Dr Smith turning into someone called Sophie, they end up sitting around the table in the central room, and somehow Ford – Nate – has a glass of something that looks a lot like whisky.   
‘So, you two know each other?’ Hardison asks. ‘And…your real name is Sophie?’  
‘Well, define real.’ Dr…Sophie speaks with her hands a lot more than Dr Smith did. ‘Having just a single name is to limit oneself, to deny the chance for exploration and expression.’   
She finishes with a nod and an encouraging smile.   
Hardison is no stranger to having multiple user names, but it’s different behind a screen. People expect it.   
‘It’s good,’ Nate says, apparently to his glass. ‘It’s good you’re here.’  
‘Good? Nate, do you have any idea what you’re saying? We’re stuck on a planet nobody knew was here!’  
Nate pulls a face. ‘Yeah, no. I’m pretty sure someone knew. And that might be our way back off this place. I have an idea, but I’ll need your help, Sophie.’ He picks up the glass and drinks, lowering the glass only a few inches after. ‘You too, Hardison. We’re going to need a hacker with your skills.’  
Before Hardison can explode appropriately at that, Nathan Ford coughs, drains his drink, and delivers his next shock.   
‘You can come down from the vent, Parker. We’re going to need you, too. I imagine you’d like to go steal a starship.’

*** 

Quinn sits near enough to his injured friend that in anyone non-deadly he’d be accused of hovering. It’s going to take a while to get used to calling him Quinn. The guy Hardison has just learned is called Eliot Spencer snorts. He seems to have gone from nearly dead to burning with very barely suppressed rage in less than an hour.   
‘Problem, Eliot?’ Nate asks from his place across the table. He’s refilled the glass.  
‘Huckleberry?’ Eliot’s voice is both softer and more growling than Hardison had expected. ‘You seriously went with Huckleberry? What, you think someone was gonna take time out of being lost in space to arrest your ass? You couldn’t just give them your actual name?’  
Quinn just grins.   
‘Are you in?’ Nate asks, as though the sideshow of Eliot and Quinn wasn’t happening.   
Eliot narrows his eyes. There’s still bruising around one of them and he had to be supported to the chair by Quinn, their argument over the name already on at least its second cycle, but Hardison has never heard of someone healing so fast.  
‘It gets us off this rock? And after that, we walk? No encores? No contact? No setting law enforcement on us?’  
Nate’s smile is barely there and completely terrifying. ‘Trust me, I won’t be running to the law.’  
From the look Eliot turns on Sophie, Parker and then Hardison, he isn’t entirely okay with it, but he agrees he’s in.   
‘Now how about you tell us what exactly it is we’re doing?’ Eliot asks.   
Hardison isn’t sure he’s ever seen someone just get up and walk off with a cryptic smile before, either. From the way Sophie rolls her eyes, it isn’t a new thing for Nate.

*** 

Eliot winces at the pull inside some of his muscles. Pushing to cover terrain he doesn’t know when he’s not fully back at strength is painful, but by rights he should be dead.   
Next to him, Quinn is doing a good enough job of pretending not to be worried.   
‘You got any plans on what to say to your girl when you get to the colony?’ Eliot asks, when they’ve gone a good way towards their goal. ‘You said she cooks.’  
‘Peggy cooks near as well as you do,’ Quinn says, his voice warm. ‘Not too sure she’ll be expecting me, though, so I might get a pan to the head instead of a meal on the table. We, er, we left things a bit up in the air. You know how these things go.’  
Eliot does know. Quinn can’t have known if he was free to go after a life with Peggy. Cutting those kinds of ties was a job of work, and took some lying low to check it’d been done right. To have gone through everything he’ll have needed to to secure his freedom from the life, Quinn must really love this woman. Eliot finds he’s glad.   
‘You tell her from me that she best feed my boy right,’ he says, instead of telling Quinn how relieved he is that his ex has someone to care for, someone who isn’t the kind of risk Eliot is.   
‘Nobody for you, then?’ Quinn asks a bit later.   
Eliot shakes his head.   
‘I ain’t dragging anyone into this mess, man,’ he says. ‘You know that. Wouldn’t be fair on them. Not like I can ever be the normal kind of husband or anything.’  
Quinn doesn’t ask anything more, and they push on in silence towards the site Nate has sent them to. 

*** 

Parker sits in the stripped back module from the most damaged family ship they have. Hardison hovers nearby, but she’s already told him she’s the best person to do this. Nate is right. Nobody else has her tolerance. Doesn’t mean Hardison has to like it.   
Shooting a stripped back command module up the old fashioned way, with no on board navigation and a lit flame for propulsion, isn’t something she’s going to miss out on now it’s been suggested. He could see she was eager to try it as soon as the words came out of Nate’s mouth. And the guy doesn’t seem to care at all it’s basically sending Parker, a woman he’s already finding himself caring about, up into the void on a giant firework.   
‘Remember, Parker, you won’t have any time once you regain consciousness,’ Hardison says, even though he’s already gone over this with her many times in the last few days. ‘You’ll pass out, you’ll come round, you’ll be groggy and there’ll be all this force pushing on you, and you have to-‘  
‘Hit the button you tell me to hit,’ Parker finishes for him. ‘I know, Hardison. I’ve got this.’  
‘Once you’re up, send the message. All frequencies,’ Nate says. ‘The colony ship will come pick us up if it’s near, and the signal will send our data-package to Earth. Worst case, we’re here until they can get a team out to us.’  
Which will be the other side of never, because the stars in the night sky have been telling Hardison they are very far from home. How they ended up here is something he’s desperate to dig into, but that’ll have to wait until they have the starship.  
‘Wake up, push button, send message.’ Parker grins at them. ‘This is fun.’  
It doesn’t feel like fun when he’s standing by the command station they’ve set up, waiting for lift-off. It doesn’t feel like fun as he watches the module rise into the sky.   
It feels even less like fun when the module explodes. 

*** 

Eliot and Quinn find the spot they’ve been sent to and wait, hidden from view of the people standing in the clearing.   
‘How in the hells did Ford know this’d be here?’ Quinn asks.   
Eliot assumes it’s rhetorical. In just a few days, every legend Eliot has ever heard about the man has become entirely believable. Nathan Ford just…sees how things are, and sees how to change them to how he thinks they need to be.   
Least, all the way up until the guy’s kid was lost.   
In his ear, Eliot hears more than one conversation. He feels a burst of worry when he hears the module has exploded. He’s only known the bundle of energy for a stupidly short time, but he doesn’t like the idea of Parker… Well, anyway. He has his own part of the plan to carry out.   
When he hears Sophie, who barely paused over the news of the module, invite the Petersons to share the tea she’s brought from home and managed to save even during the evacuation of the colony ship, Eliot gives Quinn the signal to move.   
They erupt from cover with all the speed and brutality of two men who’ve been fighting since before they really were men. The first guys go down easy, and even with warning they soon have everyone except the leader out cold. When he gets the leader in his grasp, Eliot smiles.   
‘Hello, Chapman,’ he says. Damian still sending you out to do his dirty work?’  
Chapman doesn’t want to let Eliot and Quinn take the control key for the starship, but even back when Eliot worked for Moreau, Chapman had always turned his stomach.   
‘We not worrying about taking them with us?’ Quinn asks as they wait for Hardison to hack the key through the remote connection they have. ‘Seems harsh, leaving them here with no way off world.’  
Eliot takes a look around at the men in the dirt. He knows every single one of them.   
‘Nah,’ he says, just as Hardison tells them he’s in. ‘These guys kidnap little kids, man. Tear them away from their families. Torture them. They can stay here and rot.’

*** 

The Petersons try to run when Eliot decloaks their fancy starship right outside their family ship.   
Nigel doesn’t get far. Anne shoves Sophie and makes it to the family ship as Eliot moves to catch the grifter.   
‘We’ve got her, guys,’ Nate says over comms, as Sophie swears. ‘She won’t get far.’

*** 

It’s a tight squeeze getting everyone on board the starship. It’s made even tighter by the fact Hardison has dragged every bit of tech he can into the engine rooms. He’s hooked up to glowing lines of weird looking symbols before Eliot has the ship off the ground.  
‘We need to go get Parker,’ Hardison says as soon as they break orbit, something that is both quicker and cleaner than it’s been in any other ship Eliot’s been in.   
Eliot grumbles about being nagged at, but he’s already got the scanners searching for her.   
They find her floating in her spacesuit, looking like she’s falling in place. She gives them two thumbs up as they approach, and grabs the grappling line Eliot sends for her on the first try.   
‘We done now?’ Eliot asks, once Parker is safely on board and they’ve established the colony ship is near enough to take the colonists back on board.   
‘Not quite,’ Nate says. ‘Parker, would you please tell me where you’ve been hiding my son?’ 

*** 

A month later, on the colony planet Newhaven, Peggy sets a cake down on the largest table she has in her restaurant and takes her chair next to Quinn.   
‘Looks good, darlin,’ he says. ‘What do you say, El? Didn’t I tell you my girl can cook?’  
Eliot Spencer looks up from an apparently very serious conversation with Sam Ford and he looks more relaxed than Quinn thought he’d ever see him again.   
‘Better than you deserve,’ Eliot says.   
Further down the table, Maggie Collins watches her son laughing with the man she knows is used as a nightmare to frighten people in some places. She looks again at her ex-husband and the woman who clearly wants to be his next wife, a woman Maggie already thinks she likes a lot.   
‘Military experiments?’ she says, not quite able to take in everything Nate has told her.   
‘Yes. You see,’ and Nate is settled into his explanation mode, something which used to annoy Maggie at times, but is absolutely fine with her now, ‘they found the alien tech on a scouting mission. Took it back, pulled it apart, tried to use it.’  
‘On kids?’ She doesn’t want to think that Sam was taken from them and used by the military, but she needs to be clear.  
‘Yeah. Not at first. First, they took guys from the armed forces. Guys who ended up mutilated for the most part.’  
‘Or healing real fast,’ Hardison puts in. He’s watching the other end of the table, too, but in his case Maggie is pretty sure he’s watching Eliot. ‘Damn freaky, watching him come back from the dead like that.’  
‘Not quite from the dead, Hardison,’ Nate corrects. ‘If Quinn hadn’t located him, got him away so he could heal, then Eliot would have died fighting one of the robots that was used to experiment on him.’  
Maggie has already had this explained to her, but she feels like she’ll need to hear it a load more times before it sinks in. Eliot survived because of alien tech grafted onto…into his body. That same tech drew the robot to him. And thank the gods.  
‘And Sam…’  
Nate takes her hand. Sophie offers her a look of such sympathy she wishes she could take her hand, too.   
‘Most of the adults didn’t survive for long. They thought children might be more adaptable.’  
And they took children away, telling their parents the kids were dead or missing. Mostly, it happened in areas that were poor. Kids like Sam were only taken when they were terminal, or close to it.   
‘And he’s healed, now. The alien tech, it healed him.’   
She needs to be very clear on that.   
‘Yes, Maggie. It healed him. It also made him valuable and a target.’  
Which is why, when Sterling and Nate discovered Sam was being shipped out on the colony ship under the guise of being the Peterson’s kid, but in reality heading to a handover to one of the planet’s worst men, the two of them set it up so the world’s best thieves would be on that same ship.   
‘But you didn’t know we’d crash-land on a planet we’d never heard of, though, right?’ Hardison asks.   
‘One person can’t know everything,’ Nate says.   
And Nate still doesn’t know who is at the top of the whole poisonous chain. That’s something that’ll need to come later, because the thought of it happening to other kids is horrifying.   
The robot that went rogue on the colony ship was jettisoned into space, but there’s not telling whether someone will have tracked it, and Eliot’s intel says there were five of the robots originally. It’d be naïve to think they’ve ended this problem.   
For now, though, Maggie is delighted to have her son back, and to have a safe home for him, for all of them, in one of Newhaven’s rapidly developing coastal towns.   
‘I don’t know,’ she says, squeezing Nate’s hand once before letting go. ‘I think one man might know nearly everything. I really have to send Sterling a thank-you card. Maybe some chocolates.’  
‘Mom, is Dad okay?’ Sam asks, as Nate coughs.   
Maggie smiles the kind of smile she thought she no longer had in her, and asks Peggy to please pass the cake.


End file.
